The Cabin Porn website is just the latest in a long tradition of dreaming about cabins as the gateway to a simpler life in harmony with nature. Thoreau was part of this tradition, and while certainly not the first, he contributed one of the most powerful literary representations of a simple life in nature. The cabin has become shorthand for a whole complex of values and aspirations, of self-reliance, doing-it-yourself, living off the land and off the grid, using our bodies in simple, honest, manual labor — all the things that modern urbanites supposedly have lost.